Reply to Anyone else lose their groove during Covid with young kids and still not have it back?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a mom of older kids, I'm confused why everyone things the pandemic told them something new. Yes the pandemic sucked but we weren't supported before the pandemic either. [/quote]

Yeah but the pandemic shook up the delicate balance we had to manage. My kids’ preschool closed for a while and then drastically cut hours to put kids in cohorts when they reopened. Then instead of the usual burning through PTO for routine illnesses, we were all hemorrhaging leave for 10 day quarantines often while our kids were perfectly healthy. Or if we were “lucky” told we could catch up on work at night, which isn’t really sustainable. The icing on the cake was the total shutdown of places like playgrounds so we were truly stuck at home going crazy, no play dates, no mom group meetups, etc.

So not only did we not have support, but we also had societal factors coming together to make things even harder. [/quote]

Some of you act like you were uniquely affected by the pandemic. Talk to families with teens and high school teachers…rampant mental health issues amongst that age group. High school and college years derailed.
Or talk to nursing home personnel (I volunteer at one)….the isolation and feelings of abandonment for many elderly, including people approaching death with no access to loved ones was horrible. I get that many of you are not in a good place, but so are other people. Please stop acting as if you were uniquely victimized by the pandemic. Some of you have no fricken clue.[/quote]

Please stop telling people how to feel, or rather how they’re allowed to feel, based on the fact that others may have had it worse. (And you truly have no idea the extent to what ANY posters have gone through.) Please try to have a little empathy.

I think that’s what saddens me the most about covid.  What a missed opportunity for self-reflection and the development of a more [b]functional, loving, supportive society.  [/b]Instead, hypercapitalism has run amok and nobody knows how to function “normally” anymore, because it seems there’s no baseline anymore.  It’s awful.[/quote]

What does this actually mean and look like IRL for your average working parent?   Free daycares?  Relatives babysitting your kids?  Long maternity leaves?

I don’t quite get the “support” everyone is saying that they need.  Raising kids is hard work and I don’t see how support can make it all that easier.  Maternity leave has to eventually end and even a free daycare has its many challenges.

If you want an easier life, be a SAHM but that comes with its own set of challenges.

[/quote]

Did you really just say that you don't understand why people want "support" or how it would make anything easier? WTF?[/quote]

A lot of daycares did open back up. Parents just didn’t want to send their kids.

People with nannies kept their nannies.

The shutdown was relatively short. I think people are greatly exaggerating their childcare problems. The people who were scraping by before are still scraping by. Some people have very limited resources before, during and after Covid.

We live in an affluent area. Many working moms kept their nannies. A lot of families would have a FT nanny and PT preschool. We were going on walks, beaches, farms in the summer of 2020. Things weren’t shut down for years. Our preschool opened back up in the fall of 2020.[/quote]

I don’t know why you feel the need to minimize people’s experiences. The people on here are saying they were struggling- why not believe them? Your experience was different- great, I am happy for you.

The first two months or so people were very supportive. After that I had to take unpaid leave because my job is not one I can do with two children home and virtual kindergarten with a child with severe ADHD requires a lot of hands on support and emotional intensity. Our kid was not diagnosed until back in person school because doctors were like yeah virtual kindergarten is ridiculous, what do you expect and we didn’t have a teacher evaluation to back us up on our concerns.

It was actually worse emotionally when people decided everything was back to normal but my child’s preschool was being regularly shut down for 10 days at a time for a COVID exposure. My work absolutely did not shift my responsibilities on to people with older kids- how could they when they already had a full workload? My husband and I covered the best we could and worked at night and we were exhausted. At one point in time my youngest was home for 5 weeks between his own illness, classroom shut downs and the scheduled winter break (10 days, which we had planned for, but ended up working through because we had a child home for a month before that). Some people managed by putting their children in front of an iPad for the entire day for weeks at a time. We weren’t willing or frankly able to do that.

I remember regular conversations with my friend who had one or both kids home due to illness or exposure for over a month. Her husband has to work in person for his work and they were entirely unwilling to let him even take additional unpaid leave to help with their kids home. I had kids in childcare and school before the pandemic- this was absolutely a totally different beast for us.

My kid absolutely cannot do virtual therapy (provider acknowledged as much and refused to do virtual sessions) and we lost that important level of support (which we paid $$$$$$$$$ for out of pocket) for 1.5 years until we finally found a therapist taking in person patients.

I will freely admit there have been many many harder times in history and I in general have a good, even wonderful, life despite my kids special needs. I can also feel that those years of isolation, exhaustion and worry/depression about my kids were incredibly hard. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. 
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